February 16th, 2011

http://www.vimeo.com/17079380
Build is a small design conference where interesting, talented web practitioners from around the world come to share ideas, techniques and inspiration. Tim Brown was one of these practitioners to speak about perfecting typography. Tim is the Type Manager for Typekit—an easy to use font replacement tool.

In this talk, Tim talks about the experience of setting type, things to look for, and other various ways to perfect your type. He also presents tools to use that will ultimately better your web typography. One of which is a modular scale that provides harmonious ratios of font-sizing in css. Tim was kind enough to put his scale online at Modularscale.com where you can choose between three different methods of scaling: the Golden Section, Musical Fifth and Musical Fourth.

At about 20 minutes in, Tim will explain how he chooses his font-family and his comfortable font-size, then chooses a column width from the scale. This is a strong point from this talk, however I believe the best and most important part is this:

We don’t have to remain strict to certain layouts just for the sake of filling them.